The present invention is applicable to video systems for hospitals, schools, condominiums as well as hotels and other systems having a large number of independently controlled televisions or video monitors. For the purposes of illustrating and explaining the invention, however, the prior art and the preferred embodiment of the invention will be described in the context of a video system for a hotel.
Hotels often provide video program services beyond those available on publicly available television channels and publicly accessible cable television. The two main types of prior art systems are video tape rental systems and fixed schedule movie systems.
Hotels which use video tape rental systems install video tape players in each hotel room and rent video cassettes to the guests. The primary advantages of a video tape rental system is that the guest is provided with a large selection of movies, and may view his selected movie at any time that he pleases. Major disadvantages of this type of movie service include the requirement that the guest must leave his room in order to view a movie (or make a phone call and then wait for delivery), and loss of privacy due to the fact that the guest must reveal his choice of movie to the movie rental clerk and possibly other guests who are renting movies at the same time.
Currently, the type of movie service provided by hotels most frequently consists of a fixed movie schedule of four to eight movies, usually on one to four different specially designated movie channels. Generally, all the rooms in the hotel have access to the same movie channels, allowing the entire hotel to operate from a single video cable (although repeaters and/or buffering circuitry are generally needed to service numerous rooms). The major advantages of fixed movie schedule systems are noninvasion of the guests' privacy, and the fact that guests do not need to leave their room (or wait for delivery of a movie cassette) in order to view a movie. A secondary advantage of this type of movie service, at least to the hotel, is that guests are automatically charged a fixed fee by the movie distribution system when a selected movie is viewed for more than a predefined period of time, typically around five minutes. The primary disadvantages of this type of movie service are that in order to view a selected movie, the hotel guests must conform their schedules to the scheduled viewings of the selected movie, and that the number of available movie titles is very limited.